I’m Scared Of Myself

I feel terrible about what happened all the more because I do not know why or what made me do it. I find it all a confusing matter. You see, I’m scared of myself.
Patrick Mackay, prison journal, Oct 3 1975

This painting is my portrait of Patrick Mackay.

Who? Mackay murdered anywhere between five and fifteen people during the period 1973-75, and even tried to off himself several times. He was the eldest child of Harold Mackay, an alcoholic WW2 veteran who was haunted by the horrors inflicted upon his fallen comrades by the Afrika Korps, and his wife Marion who he’d met whilst stationed in Guyana. The young lad’s childhood was turbulent to say the least, with a wife and family-beating father whose only moments of calm with Patrick were spent regaling him with horror stories from the war. Harold wouldn’t let up on the whisky intake and when he could not longer deny there was a problem he checked into the Stone House, a mental institution that would feature time and again in the saga about to unfold. The doctor recommended a less-stressful lifestyle and a cut back on the booze, but Harold was having none of it. 8th November 1962 he keeled over in Holborn Viaduct station and by the time they got him to St. Bart’s his faltering heart was about to beat its last. Patrick was ten years old when his father died. The last words he’d ever hear his father say were: “Remember to be good.” But what child ever listens to their father, eh?

Marion Mackay wouldn’t let any of the children attend Harold’s funeral. Denied the chance to see his old man dead, Patrick forged his own interpretation of events: it never happened. Dad’s not dead. He just never came home from work, that’s all. The boy grew jealous of the affection mum lavished on his sisters, but never him. Perhaps Marion saw in him too much of Harold? The same volatility, the same physical raging. “Tantrums” so pronounced they seemed like genuine epileptic seizures. Hard to pass it off as just a boy getting hysterical over nothing, but that’s what they did. Therapists talk of the ‘cry for help’, but Patrick was already far beyond that – screaming at his mother and sisters, smashing furniture. Then he started with the petty thieving, and soon acquired an eerie collection of gnomes pilfered from neighbourhood gardens. Then he began to display one of the signs of the trinity of psychopathic apprenticeship: cruelty to animals. Any beast he could lay his hands on would do, starting with family pets. Dog, cat, rabbit, even the tortoise got it, torched in a barbeque pit and then heaved over the fence. Patrick wasn’t after cheap thrills, he wanted friends. The birds he’d killed he ran around the garden with, wielding them the way other lads would toy planes. Then came the second sign of latent psychopathy: pyromania. Patrick became a burner, starting with sheds. Growing in confidence and ambition, he moved on to churches. Up with the church (local, Catholic) went any remaining traces of sympathy amongst the neighbours for the boy’s loss and, at the age of eleven, he was up before Dartford juvenile court. Twenty-one charges of theft and arson earned him three years probation. It wasn’t enough for the Brent Lane residents who didn’t want him home, who’d expected borstal or the looney bin. They didn’t care, just keep him away from the pets and the tool shed.

The police file on Patrick Mackay grew on a weekly basis, with depressingly regular call-out’s to deal with the habitual truant who was now smashing up the house and constantly rowing with Marion. A WPC who became familiar with the Mackay’s ongoing trauma took mum aside, convinced her to have the boy examined but psychiatric tests and electro-encephalogram showed nothing abnormal. Patrick turned thirteen in 1965, the year of his first suicide attempt – his head stuck in the gas oven. Several further attempst would follow, and when he wasn’t busy trying to kill himself he was trying to strangle his mother or taking the train into London to beat up strangers. Rebounding in and out of schools and institutions he was finally sectioned under the Mental Health Act and taken to Stone House, to meet Dr James Stewart, who’d attended to his father’s alcoholism years earlier. Whatever the Doctor saw in Patrick, he didn’t believe it was a cause for concern.

26th July 1968, Patrick Mackay tried to kill a boy. Arrested and remanded, there were more examinations. Dr Leonard Carr, Home Office man, recognised what all of his colleagues in the esteemed profession had failed to notice – that Patrick Mackay was a psychopath. The OED offers, in relation to that term, the following: ‘person suffering from chronic mental disorder esp. with abnormal social behaviour; mentally or emotionally unstable person.” Yes, that sounds about right, but Dr Carr went one further, determining that Patrick was a psychopath destined to kill. Carr advised use of Section 60 of the Mental Health Act, allowing for a judge to have an offender committed in a secure hospital for an indefinite period. Patrick was sent off to Moss Side Hospital in Liverpool. He treated the relaxed atmosphere as a holiday camp, but Dr Rob Porter had read the file and made his own assessment: Patrick Mackay as bomb waiting to go off. But the appeal panel discharged him and 4th December, 1969, Patrick Mackay was back on the streets.

He got a job with Kensington & Chelsea Council working as a garden labourer and lived in his aunt’s flat in Wandsworth. Evening sessions down the pub were doing no favours to his mental stability though and after the family GP saw Patrick’s nazi-crypt bedroom he was sectioned again and sent back to Stone House. Within a month, he was on the run and after another freak-out with the bayonet a Section 26 order was issued ensuring he could be kept inside for a full year. Less than pleased, Patrick made a rooftop protest, raging. Increasingly subdued with Largactil, Patrick was shunted off to Moss Side, hidden away. During his two years inside he was numbed, under-stimulated, kept calm.When he was nineteen a tribunal saw no reason to keep him, and he was loosed, for the last time. When he got out, the world had changed again. Britain was a nation and a culture on the edge of a fall, and here was the man to help it on its way. Like father, like son, Patrick had developed a taste for the bottle and was already a veteran of the turps. He was hanging on by his gnawed fingernails, doing menial work from time to time, and then locking himself away in his room to draw his favoured subject matter – corpses, coffins, gravestones. The usual things found scrawled on a schoolboy’s jotter, but there was something in the repetition, in the unevenness of the line, that unnerved those who saw them. “It’s just not healthy.”

By 1973 he was exploiting his friendship with the boys from the Cowdrey family – Denis, Terry, Lee – who enjoyed the static crackle as they orbited Patrick’s mad moon. The Cowdrey’s lived on a council terrace in Stockwell, south London. Patrick would doss down on their sofa, referring to Bert & Vi Cowdrey as “Mum & Dad.” His own mother, having fought the authorities to free him, was now terrified of what he might do next. Marion sensed his potential for total mayhem, the Cowdrey’s witnessed it. They liked Patrick, made gestures of sympathy, but soon noticed the lycanthropic shift that would take place once dusk fell and he hit the bottle or started necking amphetamines. Here was a mind that absolutely did not require any further stimulation, nor any of the speed-induced paranoia and psychosis that comes with it. Off the sauce, Patrick was a pleasure to have around, doing chores, chatty, polite. But once he was tanked, out came the doppelganger, Franklin Bollvolt 1st. In his bedroom at Frobisher Way, he went all the way with a bedside photo of Heinrich Himmler (”As you are, I was, as I am, so will you be”) stormtrooper jackboots from the Army & Navy store, Third Reich eagle crest for the wall, Iron Cross around his neck, and a home-made Nazi uniform, improvised with an emphasis on necessity – masking tape on a school blazer and a home-stitched Hackenkreuz armband. In full dress, he would sit in his room with whoever felt bold enough to join him, downing litres bottles of Dry Blackthorn and pitching for a sequel to Triumph Of The Will. On the wall were photos of Hitler and Mussolini, while Patrick obsessively watched the same war films again and again, hoping that this time the Nazi’s would win. Sometimes of an evening he would be seen out in full Nuremberg jumble-sale regalia, marching up and down the street throwing out stiff-armed salutes to the Fuhrer.

Ruth Mackay, Patrick’s troubled sister, was committed to the Stone House in 1973. Patrick himself was a suitable case for treatment but no one would touch him with a shitty stick. He was rebounding between the family home and the sanctuary of the Cowdrey’s, often making it back to neither, waking slumped in parks or piss-varnished doorways. He needed a friend, a St Christopher to carry him across the troubled waters, and he thought he’d found one in Father Anthony Crean. Crean was the chaplain at St Catherine in Shorne, not far from the Mackay family home. Crean’s cottage, the Malt House, stood behind the convent and chapel, a quiet place, a refuge for the sixty three-year old who had toughed it out during the Spanish Civil War and was now content to tend to his flock and walk the dog, with the occasional side-line in saving lost souls. In May of ‘73, Crean met Patrick Mackay when walking in the woods. Crean suggested he get the pints in and lend him his ear. “What troubles you, my son?” Rumours dogged the heels of the holy man. Pillow-biter. Cassock-lifter. Patrick to be groomed as catamite for the lonely old poof. The lad was deranged but dashing with it, boy David locks, with a face and manner that suggested Jagger/Bolan via Artful Dodger. Those most concerned about Patrick’s well-being could care less, more relieved that a priest had befriended him. He might yet be saved, but it seems Crean never got as far as discussing the Ten Commandments with Patrick. “Thou shalt not steal” went out of the window, just as Patrick came in through it, breaking and entering the Malt House, leaving with a cheque he forged, cashed and drank. Crean dropped the charges, following Christ’s lead on the forgiveness trip, but Patrick harboured considerable malice to the priest after that and the more that Crean tried to appease his ward, the more this shunted his name up Patrick’s lengthening shitlist.

8th July 1973, seventeen-year old Heidi Mnilk was on the train to Bromley. The au-pair met Patrick Mackay at the station, where he lodged a blade in her throat and then threw her on to the railways tracks. He boarded a train himself and alighted at New Cross. Twelve days later, an old woman named Mary Hyres was found dead in her Kentish Town Flat. Head battered, motive unclear. When it wasn’t murder, it was madness. Coming after a dosser with a metal spike, chasing him down the street, and waving the cudgel like a Viking storming up the beach at Lindisfarne. After that, he was down by the underpass, bricking people as they emerged out of the tunnels. When the arresting officers came, he told them that these people were Jews that had to be exterminated. Back out on the streets, charges pending, Patrick managed to secure himself a job as a grounds man at a sports field in Barnet, though his co-workers did all share the opinion that the lad was “strange.” The nicknamed him ‘Pluto’, the planet that isn’t there.

January of 1974 he found himself before Lambeth Magistrates Court where he was given a two-month sentence, suspended for one year, for the attempted assault on the wino. That was the same month he mugged the eighty-year old actress Jane Comfort on her doorstep. 12th January1974, Stephanie Britton, a fifty seven-year old widow, and her four-year old grandson Christopher Martin were found dead in her home. On another day early in 1974, an old woman was struggling home with bags of shopping when a young man offered to help her. Isabelle Griffiths, the woman, was the eighty four-year old widow of a surgeon, living at 19 Cheyne Walk, in Chelsea, an empty whiskey bottle’s throw from the Thames Embankment. She invited the helpful young chap into her home for tea, and offered him the opportunity to return, which he did, several times, running errands and providing company for a lonely old woman. That man was your friend and mine and on the evening of the 11th February he had a row with his landlord. Patrick Mackay stormed out into the night streets, pissed. Convinced to kill, there was still some last atom of restraint that asserted itself and sent him careening down Clapham Road, towards the railway lines where he intended to perform a final homage to dad. A sharp-eyed Bobby collared him and he was detained under the Mental Health Act. Seventy two hours later, on Valentine’s Day, once the booze and psychosis had worn off, he was back out on the streets, northbound for Chelsea and the home of Isabella Griffiths. The widow held the door open on the chain, but through the minor gap she could clearly see that Patrick was in an agitated state and refused to let him in. Patrick shoulder-charged the door, ransacked the place after choking the old woman to death, finishing her off with a twelve inch knife that he hilted in her chest. Job done, he downed some scotch, had a think and determined that his next course of action (what else?) was to put plates and shoes in the sink. Then he was off.

Back at the Cowdrey’s house, Patrick seemed to have settled himself down in the days and weeks that followed the old woman’s murder, a crime which was originally overlooked as the authorities had thought that Isabella had died from old age. Patrick was off the booze and the pills and spending quiet nights in, making Airfix models of World War Two fighter planes – Stuka’s, Messerschmit’s, what else? Then Patrick discovered the Aurora series of kits featuring famous monsters of filmland. Here he found his medium. Patrick did them all – Wolfman, The Mummy, Dracula and, his favourite, The Creature, Victor Frankenstein’s abomination. Patrick, hunched under a bare bulb, a crust of dried glue under his fingernails, fumbled with the Swan Vestas. The monster, as defined by Boris Karloff, was now complete, straddling his wedge of graveyard dirt. Holding a match to the model’s face, Patrick pressed the flame into the plastic eye socket, hearing a faint sizzle, copping an acrid whiff, while Adolf watched approvingly from the shadow-stained wall.

13th June 1974. The tobacconists on Rock Street, opposite Finsbury Park station, where proprietor Frank Goodman, sixty two-years old, was found dead. Brained with a lead pipe Cluedo-style. A snatch & grab robbery – the till, the cig counter, then out, leaving bloody boot prints that led towards the Cowdrey’s. Sometime during the following month, and still on the rob, Patrick broke into a friend’s house in Finchley, Thatcher’s constituency, where he filled his pockets and then set about making lunch. He was just about to tuck in when the fuzz came knocking. Next stop: Wormwood Scrubs. Four months of porridge and then he was back out on the streets of Chelsea, targeting the rich, pilfering what he could find.

9th Feb 1975, Patrick had been in Southend, taking in the air and some cod & chips in a seafront cafe. Ivy Davies had a cafe, and had closed up for the evening and walked home, where she was attacked, the killer getting some practice in with the axe.
10th March 75, Patrick Mackay, was cruising Harrod’s in search of a new victim. No takers. He downed half a bottle of Scotch and then it was off to where Elvis Costello didn’t want to go, to the preserved streets of Chelsea, to the flat of 89-year-old Adele Price where, after a terse doorstep exchange, he barged in and strangled her.
Two days later, he made another suicide attempt, this time at Stockwell underground station. Again, his ‘cry for help’ was curtailed. Mental Health Act invoked, he was detained where he had another go, this time with the cord from a pair of pyjamas. What would most politely be described as “administrative blunders” caused doctors on the psychiatric ward at South Western Hospital to make no connection between the man sat before them – chain-smoking, muttering about the Devil – and the Patrick Mackay who had seen a life-long tour of duty through the country’s mental health system. The doctors who did examine him could “find little wrong” and, once again, he was released.

20th March 1975. Patrick had been on the streets for two days since his discharge, and had quickly reverted to type – rob, drink, repeat until arseholed. It was gone midnight and after an especially heavy session, Patrick was sparked out on the sofa at the Cowdrey’s. The family had tolerated him for long enough, been dreading the date of his release, and when the an opportunity arose to taunt him, they went at it like hyenas. Accusing Patrick of being Father Crean’s catamite, they rounded on him, goaded him into putting on a display the likes of which even they’d never seen before. Beating at the living room floor with a broom handle, he fell to his knees in their living room and cried: “I am going to kill the vicar.” He set off for the Malt House. The bust up over the robbery still rankled and payback was now due. The next day, a Friday, Patrick was hung-over but still hell-bent on homicide. Knives in pocket, he caught a train to Gravesend and made an unexpected call at the Mackay family home. Mother was unable to fill his gut, so he walked on down the road, bound for Shorne. On arrival at the Malt House, Father Crean wasn’t at home, but when he did come in the door and saw who was waiting for him, he knew this was not going to end well. “The vicar” died in pretty much the manner Patrick had demonstrated to the Cowdrey’s. Father Crean was thrown into the bath, where he was stabbed and hacked to death, his skull cracked open by repeated blows from the axe he kept under the stairs.

Patrick went back to Chelsea. He mugged an old woman after storming her house, had himself one last Saturday night on the town. Pissed up, pissed off, spent in every way, he went back to where he knew they would find him. The next morning, the police called at the Cowdrey’s home and arrested him. He confessed to the murder of Father Crean and a few weeks later, admitted to the murders of Isabella Griffiths and Adele Price. He also admitted to chucking some dosser off Hungerford Bridge. On remand in Brixton he spoke to inmates about his other victims, but he was never charged due to lack of evidence. On 21st November 1975, Patrick David Mackay was sentenced at the Old Bailey to life imprisonment. Cleaned-up for court with a Flymo haircut and a demob suit, he heard the judge order that there would be no hospital treatment as “it would do no good.” Next stop: Wormwood Scrubs. He’s been in there ever since.

Patrick Mackay should have been the poster child for punk. Even more so than Sid Vicious, he exemplified everything about that social movement.Raking about the West End, Iron Cross around his neck, ragged ill-fitting suit, seams unpeeling, held together with safety-pins. He drew up the blueprints. The cider, the pills, the smashed furniture, the Swastika shock tactics, but it was no pose on his part – he meant it. What would Francis Bacon have made of him? One wild, unhinged night on the springs, or fitting subject for a study in blood. Scarlet blurs. The subject mutating before his eyes, before the paint had chance to dry. His story seaks volumes to me about the era he grew up in, which is why I felt he was such a fitting subject for a painting.

The above text is heavily-edited extract from my chapter on Patrick Mackay in TheHangman’s Breakfast. Another version of his story, written by Martin Jones and entitled: Beyond The Eyes of Frankenstein – can be seen in Saturn In Retrograde, due to be published by Headpress in (let’s be realistic here) 2010.

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